The Exorcee

Chapter Four

Pemberley, my little palace, was not necessarily the sort of apartment in which a person of means would live on purpose. It was five floors up in a building with no elevators, freezing in the winter and stifling in the summer. The walls were dingy, the rooms were cramped, and the view from the window was ugly and sad. All of that, however, was handily counter-balanced by one key factor: the shower never ran out of hot water. I’ve spent whole afternoons in that thing. After having my ass handed to me by an evil spirit in the body of an insurance salesman, the wisest course was obviously to sit in the scalding flow by candlelight, crank up some Creedence on my scarred but venerable CD player, and drink Irish whiskey until the pain receptors in my brain shut down.

“Well, B.,” I mumbled, “things could be worse. Aaaalways be worse, Brother B., am I right or am I right? ’Least we didn’t break’nything.” St. Francis of Assisi used to address his own body as Brother Ass, the stubborn recalcitrant burden-beast that lugged his soul from quest to quest—until a fellow friar pointed out to him, near the end of his life, that it had served him faithfully and deserved some consideration after all. Thereafter he called it Brother Body, and I picked up the habit from him; but for convenience, I usually just say “B.” On this particular occasion, B. was not disposed to look kindly upon my blandishments. As I had pointed out, no bones were broken; but every joint and muscle still responding to roll call was checking in with reports of crippling soreness, and my head was throbbing like every hangover since the Church canonized St. Patrick had all banded together and descended on my poor beleaguered face. “We’re not gonna be able to move tomorrow, are we?” A fresh ache came grinding up my spinal column, and I took it as a no.

I slumped over in the stall, still grasping the woefully diminished bottle, and lay on my side in the endless cataract. “Shit,” I said. “Shit, shit, shit.” Why did I talk to that old bent mean thing, that moaning wind in a hollow tree, that goblin? Why did I listen to it? It’s important to remember that they hate truth—not just “meaning of life” type of truth, but any truth at all. Correctly stating the time of day makes them angry. Nothing they say should be trusted. But they can say true things, the way a man can hold his hand in a fire, as long as they know the truth will hurt you. What if it wasn’t lying this one time? Which would be worse—if He didn’t exist, or if He didn’t care? If there were demons, then apparently there was a God who allowed Possession to occur. On the other hand, my qi-sight could simply be a benign cerebral mutation that enabled me to detect certain kinds of lunacy through imagery that was consonant with my religious upbringing. Maybe nothing supernatural was going on at all. Heck, Grey might be a government cyborg for all I could prove one way or another. There’s no such thing as science fiction anymore, there’s just stuff that science hasn’t quite gotten around to yet. I tipped my head upward and drank some more whiskey.

It occurred to me that Fr. Joe would soon be getting news of the destruction that had transpired in Our Lady of Guadalupe. It occurred to me, ancillarily (try saying that word while drunk with a sore jaw and a mouth half-full of hot water), that I had technically promised to contact him as soon as I located Grey and before I took any action. It might be better to pre-empt the inevitable scolding and call him first. Yes—that was most indubitably the path of sagacity, good sir. Right away. ’Soon as I finished the Bushmills.

Time and space get wonky when you’re drinking. The next two hours compressed themselves into a very short duration; but the five or six feet from the bathroom to the bed elongated themselves enormously. By the time I managed to crawl into my inexpressibly soft and sweet-smelling blankets, the dusk was slinking purply through my windows and the padre had left four messages on my phone. I grumbled incoherently for a few minutes and finally forced myself to call him back.

“Hello? Thomas?”

“Yeah, yeah. Don’t have to yell.”

“My God, are you all right? Where are you?”

“Home, where else. Got my ass kicked.”

“Don’t go anywhere. I’m on my way.”

“No. Psssh. Don’t come here, I’m fine. Take more than that thing to. . . fuckin’. . .”

I could hear the exhalation of exasperated breath. “Thomas—I gather you’ve anaesthetized yourself after a tough fight, but please try to focus for a moment. Are you sure you’re not injured?”

“I’m sure. Good as new in a couple days.”

“Do you have any idea where Grey might have gone?”

I shook my head, nonsensically. “Kicked him right off the roof. Disappeared. I’ll find him, Father. I promise I’ll find him.”

“I know, son, I know. You did well. Get some sleep. I’ll be over first thing in the morning.”

“Kay.”

“God keep you, Thomas.”

“Uff.” I hung up.

If you ever have the chance to sleep alone in the dark after being exposed to a malevolent intelligence from Hell, I recommend you decline. When I realized it was Thanksgiving, I went into the living room to carve the turkey and I saw Mom and Dad and Jeannie and Connor all smiling happily at me, and I started to slice into the turkey but it was a baby and it wailed at me and I tried to stop my hand but then I started stabbing my mother and she shrieked and begged and bled so much and I started to cry but I couldn’t stop stabbing her over and over and over and over, and then I remembered it was December and Thanksgiving was already past, and I relaxed and started putting up the Christmas decorations, but the lights were all violet and the shadows were too big for the room and the cookies were black and they smelled like burning flesh and the tree was covered with cherubim, crucified head downwards, and the crèche was full of maggots, and I rolled over and tried to scream and I heard my own voice crying, Moloch! Belphegor! Moloch who dwells in the furnace of the innocent! Belphegor whose loins are a thousand writhing snakes! Then I remembered I was dreaming, and I ran from the room and I saw the wasted bodies of Jesus’ people at Auschwitz, like waxen corpses, walking in the ghastly light of a calm grey sun, and they began to turn to me one by one and say, Behold, He has forsaken us, and the calm blond colonel put the pistol in my hand and I started shooting them, one by one, and I screamed and screamed but I couldn’t stop shooting them, and then I was at the great black cross and I was hammering the nails into my own feet and my father was there and he put the nails in my hands and I hung there and all was dark but my soul on the great black cross and the glowing staring eyes, red eyes, that gazed into my soul and whispered I hate you, I hate you, I knew you and I hated you before you were formed in the womb, from all eternity I have hated you, Thomas Belmont, forever and ever and ever.

Then I felt a hand slapping my bruised face and I heard a raw, scraped voice screaming and I realized it was mine. I heard Fr. Joe shouting my name, felt him shaking me, felt myself coming back from the Hell-mare. “Okay,” I said hoarsely. “Okay, okay. I’m here. I’m here.”

“Thomas? Look at me, son.”

I opened my eyes and saw daylight. Must’ve slept over twelve hours. “I’m here, padre.” My throat hurt. “Pretty sure I locked the door, by the way.”

“I kicked it in. The diocese will cover the damages.”

“Swell. What time—” I started to rise, and then gave a rending groan and fell back as my muscles seized up. I hadn’t been this sore since my first week of training under Sensei Hatfield.

“Lie still, old friend. It’s about a quarter past eight. Just relax.”

He got up, and I clutched at him. “Don’t go.”

“I’m not. I’m not going anywhere. I brought you some food, that’s all. Sit tight.” He went out into the hallway and came back a second later with a paper bag labeled “Dunkin Donuts” and a huge steaming Styrofoam cup. “A very pretty young lady called Leah asked me to say hello.”

I almost smiled. “I got better friends than I deserve. Now gimme the coffee before I bite your jugular, old man.”

Fr. Joe rummaged in my little kitchen and started brewing more coffee for the both of us while I ate. Then he went through my CDs, found the copy of Handel’s Messiah he’d given me last Christmas, and started it playing. Next he re-lit all my candles and opened all my curtains to let in the sun. Finally, with a well-filled mug of his own, he came over and sat by my bedside in the ancient comfy chair I liked to call The General. “Now,” he said. “Can you talk about it?”

“Not an experience I’ll be filing under ‘happy memories,’ but yeah, I can talk about it. First thing I did was visit Ella Grey.”

And then, because you never know what little detail might later become important, I told him everything I could remember from the time I left his office, including every harrowing moment of the dream-damnation from which I’d just awoken. He listened in silence till I was done and then asked clarifying questions, and we went back through and studied every aspect of the showdown with Grey. One thing was definitely clear: I’d never run up against such a powerful opponent before.

“Still,” Fr. Joe said pensively, “it doesn’t have complete control of him yet. Some part of him must be fighting it.”

I nodded. “Seems like.” See, the last thing an unclean spirit wants is to be identified as a separate entity from its host. An exorcism can’t even begin until the priest has forced it to stop hiding behind the victim’s persona and declare its own name (or one of its names, anyway). So why do the Possessed go around puking and levitating and screeching obscenities, thus drawing attention to their aberrant state? All of that is the fallout of the clash between the human soul and the invading evil. As long as the host keeps fighting, the demon can never pass for normal; it might, at best, be mistaken for profoundly insane (hence the Church’s insistence on psychological testing). However—there is a state called Perfect Possession, in which the human host consents entirely to the invasion and becomes totally subsumed, and in those cases—supposedly—it’s practically impossible to tell that a person is actually a demon, and furthermore the Rite of Exorcism has no effect whatsoever. Neither I nor the padre had ever witnessed such a case, but we’d heard some very grim stories.

“Well, between the storm and the brevity of your encounter, none of the neighbors saw or heard anything—which leaves us with nothing in the way of a lead. We don’t even know which direction Grey went after the fight.”

“Couldn’t’ve been west,” I said helpfully. “That’s the way I went.”

He frowned into his cup. “I’m afraid that’s not much to go on.”

“I know that, padre. It’s a new technique I’ve been looking into, called the ‘joke.’” I flexed my fingers in the air to indicate quotation marks. “It functions by the sudden perception of incongruity to elicit a reaction known as ‘mirth.’”

“Are you done?”

“Jeez, tough audience. All right, look—this thing doesn’t appear to be interested in concealment, and the cops are already looking for Goodman Grey. Best I can think to do for now is fire up the ol’ police scanner and wait’ll he pops up on the grid.”

“So they can haul him away and pump him full of drugs? That rather beats the purpose of my calling in a freelance retrieval expert. I need our doctors to corroborate your reading for the bishop.”

“Trust me, they’re not gonna catch this thing. Tear-gas and tasers won’t stop it, and they can’t shoot an unarmed man. All I need to do is follow their trail, wait for them to lose the suspect, and then swoop in.”

“And how do you plan to pacify our friend for safe transport?”

“Dunno. But I’ve got a couple days of convalescence ahead of me, so I should have plenty of time to come up with a strategy.”

He nodded slowly. “I suppose it’s all we can do at present. Let’s just pray that abomination doesn’t hurt anyone before you find it.”

“Why don’t you handle that, Father. I’ll be praying it doesn’t hurt anyone after I find it.”